one-hit wonder Read Free Page A

up looking like one of those fashion illustrations—and it was all very well to look like a fashion illustration if you were just a drawing, but it didn’t look nearly so good when you were an actual human being. It looked plain freakish. Ana had suddenly sort of stretched when she was twelve, quite dramatically. It had been like a special effect in a horror film—you could almost hear the muscles twanging and the bones creaking as her skinny little girl’s body shot up six inches in the space of a year, leaving her with the lankiest, inches in the space of a year, leaving her with the lankiest, knobbliest limbs ever seen in Devon. People kept telling her that she’d “fill out”—but she never did. Instead, she developed a special way of holding herself, her shoulders hunched forward, her head bowed, curtainlike hair swinging forward to cover her face, and a way of dressing—muted colors and flat shoes—in an effort to disguise her height.
    Ana looked around her as she walked and realized that women in London looked like newscasters, or talk show hosts, like the sort of women you only ever normally saw on the telly. Their hair was all shiny and dyed interesting shades of blond and mahogany. They wore tight trousers and strappy dresses and shoes with heels. They had full makeup and all-over tans. Their handbags matched their shoes, their nails were all the same length. They smelled expensive. Even the younger women, the ones in their teens and early twenties, looked somehow finished. There were women of all colors and all nationalities, and they all looked fantastically glamorous.
    And there were breasts absolutely everywhere—hoisted high in push-up bras, tamed and contoured under tight tops in T-shirt bras, firm and unfettered inside tiny dresses. And nearly all paired up with minuscule bottoms and tiny, taut waists. My God, thought Ana, was having a fabulous pair of breasts a prerequisite in this city? Did they hand them out at Oxford Circus? Ana peered down at the contents of her Lycra top and felt a burn of inadequacy. And then she caught sight of her reflection in the front window of Smith’s. Her long black hair was dirty and tangled, and because she’d left home in such a hurry, the clothes she was wearing had come straight off her bedroom floor—faded black jeans, khaki Lycra top with white deodorant patches under the arms, nubby old black cardigan she’d had since she was a teenager, and scuffed brown Hush Puppies—the only pair of shoes she owned, because it was next to impossible to get decent shoes in a size ten.
    She thought of her mother’s parting words to her as she saw her off at the door that morning: “If you get any spare time at all while you’re in London, go shopping, for God’s sake, get yourself some decent clothes. You look like a”—
    she’d searched around for a sufficiently disparaging description, her face crumpled with the effort—“you look like a . . . dirty lesbian .”
    The man who served her in Smith’s didn’t make any eye contact with Ana, didn’t really acknowledge her in any way.
    In Bideford, in her nearest branch of Smith’s, there would have been an attempt at conversation, some inane commentary, a smile. In Bideford Ana would have been expected to give a little of herself back to the assistant, whether she liked it or not, just so as not to be thought rude.
    She found the lack of interaction pleasantly refreshing.
    The Underground map on the back of her newly acquired A-Z informed her that it was only two stops to the Baker Street tube station on the Circle Line, and that she wouldn’t have to change lines, which came as a great relief to her. She sat, sweating damply on an almost empty tube for what seemed like only a few seconds and then found her way easily to Bickenhall Street, a short street filled with faintly menacing redbrick apartment buildings, seven stories high.
    Bickenhall Mansions came as a complete shock to her.
    When she’d looked at